Gedit: Keyboard Gestures for Mobile Text Editing

Mingrui Zhang, Jacob O. Wobbrock

Abstract: Text editing on mobile devices can be a tedious process. To perform various editing operations, a user must repeatedly move his or her fingers between the text input area and the keyboard, making multiple round trips and breaking the flow of typing. In this work, we present Gedit, a system of on-keyboard gestures for convenient mobile text editing. Our design includes a ring gesture and flicks for cursor control, bezel gestures for mode switching, and four gesture shortcuts for copy, paste, cut, and undo. Variations of our gestures exist for one and two hands. We conducted an experiment to compare Gedit with the de facto touch+widget based editing interactions. Our results showed that Gedit’s gestures were easy to learn, 24% and 17% faster than the de facto interactions for one- and two-handed use, respectively, and preferred by participants.

TL;DR: In this work, we present Gedit, a system of on-keyboard gestures for convenient mobile text editing.

Keywords: Text entry, text editing, gestures, touch screen, ring gesture, smartphone, mobile devices